You have a goal. You want to gain actionable insights from all of this data that you have been collecting. So, how do you make sure to model your data so that you can actually gain these insights and answer the business questions that you have? You plan. When the planning stage is skimped on or skipped altogether, the result is horrible. The performance and analysis suffers, data integrity and security issues ensue, and the overhead for maintenance and development balloon to unnecessary levels. In this article, Smart Data Collective takes a look at some common mistakes that are made when modeling your data in preparation for analysis.
Please remember to submit your job postings for the September 2016 Job Board to Brendan Buff!
A phenomenal shift has occurred over the past few years in the enterprise data world. The ubiquitous data warehouses ? the foundation for business intelligence and data discovery for several decades ? are now becoming obsolete due to the emergence of data lakes. While both data warehouses and data lakes have their pros and cons, a new era of ?smart? data lakes based on semantic technology is emerging that can reduce the disadvantages of either, creating a clear path for the industry.
The Center for Data Innovation spoke with Mark Johnson, founder of Descartes Labs, a crop forecasting startup in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Johnson discussed how his company beats official government sources at predicting crop yields and how his company was able to commercialize software developed with federal research and development funding.
One of the defining traits of open data is that it is freely available to the public without any restrictions. In short, open data must be?open. However, in March 2016, a committee in the California state legislature approved Assembly Bill 2880 (AB 2880), which would grant the state and local governments the ability to apply intellectual property restrictions to all government materials. While supporters of the bill ostensibly intended AB 2880 to prevent potential intellectual property copyright disputes with contractors, in effect the legislation could make everything a public entity creates, such as reports, maps, and of course, data, subject to copyright protections that would restrict the public?s ability to access and use this material.
The prospect of a statewide data analytics program is a daunting one. In Ohio, CIO Stu Davis is starting to look at a centralized model that would enable the state to look at data sets from a variety of agencies and departments. At the NASCIO Mid-Year Conference last month, Davis told Government Technology that the state needs an analytics partner to help it get the most out of its information resources. One potential partner? The state of Indiana, whose Management and Performance Hub represents a model that many in government are watching closely.
Beginning with the recent release of 2014 statistics and continuing through the release of 2016 data, the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs will supplement the Survey of Business Owners, conducted every five years. The Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs provides a timely, more frequent socio-economic portrait of the nation?s employer businesses by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status. It includes a relevant topic not found in the Survey of Business Owners: the number of years a firm has been in business. The survey is a public-private partnership among the U.S. Census Bureau, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Minority Business Development Agency.
As the academic year begins, the Census Bureau is rolling out a new U.S. Census Bureau program, ?Statistics in Schools? aimed at making a real and positive difference in American education. Statistics in Schools offers teachers and students a free toolbox brimming with comprehensive statistical information to enrich the K-12 academic experience.
Carlos Bonilla put together an impressive wrap up, along with the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia, of all the crashes in the streets of Philly with the hopes of determining if there was an area with a higher incidence. The data revealed that a North Philly neighborhood has both the highest overall crash density and higher than average values for poverty and carless households.
Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
Calls for Comment
APDU maintains a list of open calls for comment on proposed federal data collections. We periodically alert APDU members to newly added calls for comment. Over the last several weeks, calls for comment on the following proposed data collections were published in the Federal Register (with due date):
